


Dream a Little Dream

by tzzzz



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e20 The Last Man, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:16:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tzzzz/pseuds/tzzzz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney asked Carson if he wanted to dream. He didn't bother to ask John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream a Little Dream

The first hundred years is sports games. John is Doug Flutie, he's Eli Manning. Once, he's John Madden in charge of drawing little Xs and circles on ESPN screens.   
  
He can feel the wind in his face, the rush of bodies all around him. He can  _smell_ them. It's that thick musky stench of guys pushing their bodies to the limit. The clothes cling to him, bunch up in his sweat. Every once and a while he pauses to wonder at the attention to detail that must go into programing that, if some poor Ancient VR designer had to come up with an algorithm for chaffing.   
  
All the cheerleaders are blond. One looks disturbingly like Dr. Keller. One day, John is Troy Aikman and she smiles at him just so. He fumbles the pass and loses the game, but then they're alone in the locker room. It's small and dirty and vaguely reminiscent of a public high school and not a professional football team.  
  
She leans in to kiss him, but John holds up a hand. "No more football," he says.  
  
He's tired of winning game after game, knowing it means nothing.  
  
She looks confused for a brief moment, before something shifts. Her posture goes straighter and her chin tilts up defiantly.  
  
"Fine," she says.  
  
  
  
The next hundred years are memories. They are happy ones. He's his father, watching himself and Dave make faces at the gorillas at the San Diego Zoo. He and Danny are riding out through the twisted back country of the Badlands and snuggling together under the silver light of the full moon. It's V day at the end of Desert Storm and he can't stop smiling, having won his first war with only a few easy bombing raids.   
  
He remembers the cool waters of Cape Cod, the quiet damp of the Sierras, the soft fall of snow in Switzerland, the heavy oppressive humidity coming of the Potomac that night in DC when he first met Nancy.   
  
There are all those times he'd almost forgotten in the innocence of childhood. How much his parents had loved him. He wishes he had remembered all this later, when his dad was dying a galaxy away. His mother's touch is just as warm and soothing as he remembers it. Her eyes are glittering and brilliant. But a part of him recognizes that perhaps it's not all her in that embrace. His mother never treated him with such longing. Before her death, she'd always had everything she needed.  
  
John touches. There are bodies on loop, softened from the sharp sting of pornography in memory. His first kiss with Sandy Winchester, the rather uppity (and somewhat domineering) girl next door, seems sweeter now, than the disgustingly _wet_  thing he remembers from eight years old. Nancy is glorious, their first time painted through with all of the intimacy he still feels for her, even after everything that happened. The powers of this place allow him to skip seamlessly over his first time and all the awkward embarrassment of it, going straight to the first time Danny touched him, reaching over while they were looking at John's fresh stock of ill-gotten Playboys. Then there's Mark and John's other virginity, the way it had felt to be so deliciously vulnerable.  
  
John gets lost in memories of Stanford then, from the first time he smoked a joint to the keggers and the trouncing they gave Cal his freshman year when John had painted a giant red S on his chest (and lived with the resulting sunburn). There are his buddies, Tom and Mick. Nintendo tournaments, ROTC, weekends down at SLAC, pushing Mark up against one of the checkpoints towards the end of the accelerator, knowing that the people on the other end were too far away to see, despite the straight shot they had to the end of the tunnel.   
  
There are not wars yet, no Colombia or Kosovo or Afghanistan. Flight is the cool blue skies over Edwards, zipping out over the wide sands of the desert to race right up to the empty faces of the Sierras, before vaulting up towards space. Choppers are the beat of the rotor blades in time with the wild stutter of his heart. The target range smells of gun oil and burnt power, and shooting at man shaped targets is still fun.  
  
Earth is his home again, instead of just a vague ideal that he keeps fighting for. And the moment he realizes this, something in the illusion snaps. He's laying out in the middle of a field, Dave beside him, rambling on about his first year at Harvard and all the interesting people and guest speakers and Boston. John pushes himself up, meeting his brother's familiar hazel eyes and says. "I want to go to Antarctica. It's the only continent we've never been to."  
  
"You would," Dave says, not sounding like Dave at all.  
  
  
  
Antarctica is a cold and desolate as he remembers, but there's something that John still loves about the solitude, the wind blowing in off the peaks and the harsh waves of the almost frozen sea. Here, he's always flying, over glaciers and mountains and ice breaking off into the sea. It's honest.  
  
"I still don't see what you like about it," General O'Neill grouses, appearing suddenly beside him. "It's freezing here. I probably have frostbite already. Poor circulation, runs in the family. I once thought it might be related to lupus, but I was a big hypochondriac back then."  
  
"I'm sure you were," John smiles, for the first time in what feels like forever, despite the torrent of happy memories that have been years of his dream state. "Aren't we about due to be hit by a glowing squid missile, sometime soon?"  
  
"I have no idea what you're talking about," O'Neill grumbles, but without looking at him, John can sense his smile.  
  
The missile comes and dodging it turns into a long drawn out game of JetFighter. But after John is done indulging, he's down in a familiar cavern, the inviting hum of Ancient Technology all around him.  
  
"Think about where we are in the universe," Rodney says, and John thinks  _finally._  
  
  
  
John's not sure how many years he spends in memories from Atlantis. He pushes Rodney of a balcony five times before things kick further ahead with a disgruntled, righteous feeling. Their first year is tinged with sadness, sitting around campfires and picking on Ford for his youth and naivety. Teyla is still unfamiliar, but she revels things that he's pretty sure he never knew, like the time she had an allergic reaction to Mabasa root and had to spend a week in and out of an herbal bath to clear up the hives, or who was really responsible for accidentally dying six pairs of John's socks pink.   
  
There are sparring sessions and late nights fiddling with things in the lab at Rodney's side. But there's sadness there too, because this is before Doranda had tested their friendship and the many things that make them so much closer now. Rodney enjoys John's presence but stops just short of really teasing him, or bringing up arguments that sound too geeky. He still seems surprised by John's abilities with numbers. And it hurts when John asks him back to his quarters or if he wants to try a game of chess instead of their Ancient Civilizations game and Rodney looks shocked and uncertain.  
  
Ford never leaves these memories. He sticks around to get his ass handed to him in sparring sessions with Ronon, looking up at John like a kicked puppy every time he suggests that they train together. Teyla never gets pregnant, even for conversations and happy times when he remembers that she was. John's not sure what to make of that. Maybe he just doesn't need the reminder of what will happen to her because of the baby.   
  
Carson hovers, talking about fishing and Scotland, and in one brilliant diversion, the whole team goes with him to the highlands (which seem to be inexplicably filled with sheep and men that look disturbingly like Mel Gibson running around in kilts. They got to visit Carson's mum and she bakes the most delicious cake that John has ever had.   
  
Elizabeth hangs around too, and John gets the distinct impression that she and Sam are doing it. Or rather, he stumbles upon Rodney watching them make out on some security monitor one day. "You fantasy?" he asks, but Rodney splutters, the screen going dark without him even touching it.  
  
"Is this what your program devotes processing power to all day?"  
  
"No. I'm doing this for your benefit. Surely, you've fantasized about--" Rodney trails off, realizing how much he's given away. "I have to go."  
  
"No," he grabs Rodney's hand, knowing that no physical act will stop him from retreating, leaving only the early shell of John's memory in place. "You're the only one _alive_  here," he pleads, because as nice as it is to be surrounded by happy memories of his friends and family, in a world where none of them will ever have to leave or die, it's all two dimensional and, even though it's taken him hundreds of years to realize it, it's just the same as the empty football games. He knows the outcome. What's the point in playing?   
  
Rodney laughs, it's dry and hollow and different, like the hologram and not like any Rodney that John remembers. "I'm not real. I'm the only one here who's not. When Rodney made this program, he remembered how upset you had been since you all lost Teyla. He wanted to give you something happy. I'm not even supposed to be here."  
  
"But you are." John takes Rodney's hands in his, like a lifeline. "You're here because you want to be."  
  
Rodney ducks his head, looking so incredibly young. "I'm sorry. Just, he made me like him. After what happened, with all the sand, I can't just shut down. I have to monitor the solar conditions. It has to be just right."  
  
"How long has it been?"  
  
"381 years, six months, seven days, two hours and eleven seconds."  
  
John feels his not-gut clench. "That's a long time."  
  
"Twenty days, now. Stasis slows your neural functions. It's like connecting to the internet via dial up."  
  
"Sorry. You've been running all this time?"  
  
Rodney nods.  
  
"It must be lonely." John thinks about Blade Runner, and there they are. This is just a machine, a computer program. And yet, he's hear against the instructions of his maker.  
  
"It could be worse, you could want me to be Seven of Nine."  
  
John shrugs. "Seven of Nine was hot."  
  
"I could make  _her_  kiss Colonel Carter."  
  
Not something John really needs to see from his CO.  
  
"Sorry," Rodney replies.  
  
"So you can see what I'm thinking?" John feels suddenly violated. His thoughts have always been his own, and private.  
  
"You are plugged into the mainframe. How do you think the VR is running?"  
  
John wants to tell him to stop, get the fuck out right now, but something stops him. "What's it like? I mean, do you see things like I do or is it just a bunch of code?" It disturbs him to think that his thoughts can be distilled down to something so simple that a computer could just read it.   
  
Rodney pauses a second, as though he doesn't have days and an entire computer core at his disposal to come up with an answer. "It's amazing."  
  
John has to grin a little at that look on Rodney's face. He seems almost childlike in his wonder. John takes a deep breath, even though he doesn't even need to breath. "I need you to stop."  
  
"Oh," Rodney whispers, clearly disappointed.   
  
"Hey, you're lonely right? You need someone to spend time with?"  
  
Rodney nods, looking guarded.  
  
"And what fun are friends if you can know every little thing they're thinking?"  
  
If Rodney has been in John's thoughts then he knows John's real fantasy. And it's not Carter macking it with Elizabeth. "You obviously know enough about me. Show me something about you."  
  
  
  
The next hundred years fly by in a blur with everything from Rodney and Jeannie constructing a heavy duty speed sled in order to win a competition, to kissing Jennifer on the observation deck of the Daedalus. He understands Rodney's awe the first time he meets Sam Carter, one of a handful of women who doesn't bow to his intelligence. He understands how Rodney and Jennifer found each other, the only two people in the world who could possibly understand. He feels Rodney's sadness of losing Ronon, insists on seeing every detail of the complex where they find Teyla, body and all. He suspects that his brain is being lent some processor power to follow Rodney through MIT and later Northwestern. And suddenly he understand the way Rodney sees the world as a wash of incredible and elegant possibilities (many of them disastrous, but all of them beautiful). He tries to understand the Ascension machine, and he feels Rodney's panic the first time he thought he sent John off to his death (he refuses to show John any times after). There's Doranda and the crushing guilt of it all, another disappointment on top of a long childhood of social ostracism and failure to win his parent's love.  
  
There are happy memories, too. The first time Rodney learned about the Stargate Program, building a working model of a nuclear bomb, winning prize after prize in his field, Jeannie as a child, the only other person in his world who could hope to understand him. John wonders how Rodney feels about the team. He sees affection and annoyance in the memories of trying to spar with Ronon and an honest love for Teyla that goes far beyond any not so subtle appreciation of her body. He seems to enjoy sitting out on the beaches of the mainland with the team as much as John does. But the real things John wants to see, he keeps carefully guarded. So many of John's own happy memories centered around Rodney, but he's not sure Rodney feels the same. None of the memories he shows John feature just the two of them alone.  
  
When he asks Rodney why, the other man just grumbles and replies, "We've both already been there, done that."  
  
John wants to point out that they've already done all of this, but then he thinks maybe that's not what Rodney wants. This Rodney refers to himself in the third person, because even with what seems like most of Rodney's memories, he's not the same person. He doesn't even know what the real Rodney went on to become. Maybe he doesn't want to be reminded of that difference. "Then let's do something different."  
  
"What?"  
  
"This is a virtual environment, right? Meaning we can do whatever we want."  
  
John blinks and it's Star Wars. He's Han Solo and Rodney is C3PO.  
  
"Very funny," Rodney grouses, shifting the scene to Star Trek. John is, predictably, Captain Kirk and Rodney is Spock.  
  
"Yes, because you're the  _least_  emotional person I've ever met."  
  
They spend the next fifty years playing out various movie scenarios, with added twists. Rodney fixes the physics in Back to the Future (except John makes him still use a DeLorean, because you can't do the movie without it). John, as Indiana Jones, gets to punch Hitler in the face. They even get really good at wizard's chess. They're in the middle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (because they want to see what Ronon could do if they gave him Hong Kong wire fighting skills), when John stops, turns to Rodney and says, "Hey, we don't even have to stick to this."  
  
John gives himself wings, so he can fly over continent after made up continent. Rodney turns himself into Bob's Big Boy and eats half of Tokyo. They insert the Wraith into House of the Dead, and kill them all. John goes diving without any scuba gear. And they put themselves floating through space, using the city's star charts to see a hundred worlds.   
  
"This is what it must be like to be Ascended," Rodney whispers, a note of longing in his voice. "To be able to see everything as relaxed as though it doesn't even matter what happens."  
  
That makes John pause, because Rodney had been offered Ascension and chose to live instead. "I didn't think you were a fan of that kind of thing."  
  
Rodney shrugs, trying for casual. "I guess hundreds of years floating around inside a computer core does things to you."  
  
Or maybe Rodney himself was tired of the responsibility. He'd left Atlantis, after all. He was going to live out his quaint little civilian life with Dr. Keller. "Maybe he did Ascend. He was in the zone, once," John replies.  
  
"Maybe."  
  
"And you're not just floating around inside a computer core. You're here. With me." John reaches out, like he never did nearly fifty thousand years ago, like he wouldn't dared have a hundred years ago. He takes Rodney's hand in his and squeezes.  
  
For a second, something flickers in Rodney's eyes and there's a brief flash of computer code. John's method of computer repair may be to turn on and off repeatedly, but he's been around Rodney enough to recognize a hack when he sees one. "You don't have to," he whispers. "Just ask."  
  
Rodney nods, slow and deliberate, before leaning in and brushing his lips against John's.  
  
Their first time isn't like Mark or Nancy or anybody John has ever been with. Maybe it's familiar to Rodney, who never showed John any scenes of his own intimacy. Rodney has thrown physics out the window, because they're still floating in space, but somehow don't end up pushing each other off into the void, or floating in little globules of come. Then they're back on Earth at John's old family beach house. They're in Canada, skiing up at Banff. They visit Jeannie. They visit  _Dave_. They stay in the house Rodney and Jennifer were supposed to live in together. They make love a hundred times (in various incarnations of their physical bodies) and it still doesn't seem like enough.  
  
  
Especially not one day when Rodney's comes in, flushed from the early chill of fall, a wondering frown on his face. "Times up," he whispers.  
  
"Huh?" John is working on a chess set, carved out of wood, like he wanted to once in shop class as a kid, but never had the time.   
  
"Time's up. 702 years, one month, three hours, nine minutes, and twenty-seven seconds."  
  
"That's it?" John asks. "That's all we get?"  
  
Rodney laughs, settling down at John's side. "That's not enough?"  
  
"No." It's really not.  
  
"You're right," Rodney says, kissing John one last time.  
  
John thinks about the question that's been percolating in his mind these past hundred years. But for all the times that he's insisted that this Rodney is as real a person as any, he can't ask it.  
  
Rodney knows him too well, however. "I don't know if, when you go back, you'll be able to do this with him. I mean, he kept some things-- He didn't program me with everything. You saw everything I am."  
  
John nods. He can't bring himself to say goodbye, not when he knows that the second he goes through the gate, he'll drain the power needed to keep the shield up and keep Rodney's program running. It least he knows it'll be painless. And that by going back, he'll keep this from happening all over again.   
  
He kisses Rodney one last time, feeling all the longing and desire still there and wondering how it is Rodney experiences, whether or not he even cares about the sensation, only the intimacy. "I'm going to miss you."  
  
"Everyone misses a good dream."  
  
John nods. And then he wakes up.


End file.
